• Salted Butter Caramel Ice Cream Recipe | David Lebovitz
  (tags: icecream recipe)

• Summer Ice Cream Recipe Round-Up | David Lebovitz
  Sigh. (tags: icecream recipe resource)

• Ice Cream With Honey and Thyme | washingtonpost.com
  I’m probably going to have to establish some house rule that requires 4 hours of gym time before any use of the ice cream maker is implemented.
  (tags: icecream recipes)

• 07 Holiday Gifts: Creamy Caramel « Straight from the Farm
  I pretty much just want to eat this straight from the pan with a giant spoon.
  (tags: gifts canning recipe dessert)

• Gift in a Jar: Rosemary Maple-Glazed Nuts | Food in Jars
  Slightly more exotic than the traditional McCormick’s spiced nut recipe I usually make…
  (tags: gifts recipes)

• Lemon Vanilla Jam – Canning Across America There isn’t a thing about this that doesn’t sound delicious. (tags: gifts recipes)

But, sometimes you get special surprises. Like this zucchini plant that I bought which isn’t a zucchini plant. This isn’t the first time I’ve come home with a mislabeled plant.  I didn’t realize it until a week or two ago, when I was all, “Those are some funny-colored zucchini.”

At first, I thought it might be a white eggplant, but it was too yellow. And the leaves were very “squash.” After an extreme amount of Googling (some of which made me want to claw my eyes out. People do wrong things with vegetables and there is evidence of that on the internet), I determined that it’s a Lebanese White Bush Squash.

I’ve never had one of those before. Never even heard of it, honestly. But summer squash is pretty much always summer squash no matter what color the skin is, and in most recipes it’s interchangeable. One of my favorite ways to use up squash is with pancakes. One the rowdy night when Mr. Begonia had to work late and I was on my own for dinner, I made myself a big batch of these. Seriously, they are so good that I sat down on the kitchen floor and ate them as they came out of the pan. Never even made it to the table.

I also drank most of a bottle of wine. Which explains why there aren’t many pictures here, and the pictures you do see are not my most awesome. Particularly this one: Apparently I decided to cook a couple of these heart-shaped because I loved them so much.

Sooo…

You don’t need to really top these with anything, but I had some homemade 3-pepper jam, so that kicked up the awesome. These are easily made vegan by using an egg substitute in place of the regular eggs.

Summer Squash Pancakes

Adapted from my mom and Ina Garten

Ingredients

• 2 medium or 1 large summer squash (about 1 pound or 3 cups grated).
• 1 medium shallot, chopped
• 2 large eggs, lightly beaten or equivalent amount of egg replacement
• 1/3 cup all-purpose flour
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 teaspoon kosher salt
• 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
• 1 clove garlic, mashed
• handful of fresh parsley, chopped (approximately 1/4 cup)
• vegetable oil

Directions
Preheat the oven to 200 degrees F.
Trim out seeds from the inside of the squash. Grate the squash using a box grater. Press out excess water in a colander. (NOTE: THIS IS IMPORTANT! If you don’t let the extra water drain out, your batter will be too runny. I usually let my grated squash sit in the colander for about 20 minutes, under a linen towel weighted with a heavy soup can. In 3 cups of grated squash, about 5 tablespoons of liquid will drain).

Stir in the onion and eggs or egg substitute. Stir in 1/3  cup flour, the baking powder, salt, and pepper. Add more a tablespoon or two of flour if the batter is extremely runny.You should have something slightly more fluid than regular pancake batter, but not watery.

Heat a 10 or 12-inch skillet over medium heat and heat 1 tablespoon oil in the pan. Lower the heat to medium-low and ladle 1/4 cup of batter into the pan. Cook the pancakes about 2-3 minutes on each side, until brown and crispy. Place the pancakes on a sheet pan and keep warm in the oven. Add another tablespoon of oil to the pan, if needed, and continue to fry the pancakes until all the batter is used. Serve hot.

Makes approximately 8 pancakes–enough to serve 2 or 3 people.

Kitty is most awesome cat ever and everything she does is perfect, except one little thing that may end up with me getting my brain eaten by an infected hoard.  While she spends most of her time being adorable,  Kitty does one thing that’s not awesome. She unlocks doors. Specifically, she unlocks our dining room door on a regular basis. It’s a sliding glass door and we use a heavy wooden dowel to block the slide-track and keep the door closed. Miss Kitty, who is a rubinesque 6 year old 22 lb.  Maine Coon, is able to paw the dowel out of the track, leaving the door unsecured and us vulnerable to zombie attack.

Whenever we see her starting to fuss with the door, we chase her off and lecture her about the dangers of zombies.

Apparently I’ve taken this too far.  I just finished this beautiful scarf and when I went outside to take this picture, she locked me out of the house. This left me vulnerable to the zombie hoard in an entirely different way.

Somehow she managed to push the dowel back into the track, blocking the door shut again.

My natural reaction was to run in a circle and scream for Mr. Begonia to come rescue me, because it was hot and sunny and I was without sunscreen and I am a delicate flower who will BURN in ten seconds. My instinct was not to walk 50 feet around to the house to the front door, which was totally unlocked.

My dog was trapped with me. Her reaction? To plop down in a sunny spot and take a nap while the crazy lady did her crazy dance.

Once we got inside, Miyagi solemnly congratulated me on surviving being in the sun for 3 whole minutes.

Now, a note on the scarf. It’s the Cocquille Shawl pattern from Knitty. It’s a really great pattern and it took me about 2 weeks of intermittent attention to finish it up. I did alter it, though, by adding a few extra gussets in each set and an extra set of garter repeats at each segment. I did this to use up as much of my yarn as I could. I think I had about 1200 yards, and this used up at least 800. So I should have enough left for some matching gloves.

The yarn? It’s a mystery. Because I lost the tag. The house has been torn apart in search, but alas: nada. I know I got it at the Bonita Knit and Sew in California last summer when Mr. Begonia and I were visiting his brother in San Diego. I remember this specifically because I almost accidentally drove into Mexico looking for the shop. But it looks like they have since closed. All I know is that it’s a light fingering weight, I’m pretty sure it’s alpaca, and it’s sinfully soft and smooshy. It wouldn’t protect me from zombies, though.

There’s lots of stuff that the movies and TV doesn’t tell you about cancer and treatment because it’s not dramatically glamorous. Like your eyelashes fall out, your fingers and toes swell up until your nails fall off, that chemo damages your senses until all food tastes like dirt, or that your skin turns blue and green and you have to have ports and tubes surgically implanted and you can’t hug your kid until they get taken out. Like I said. Cancer. Fucking. Sucks.

People respond to stress and bad news in different ways, and of course friends want to help. And my friends is lucky to have lots of friends and family who love her into a million pieces and want to do everything they can. Unfortunately, when it comes to heavy stuff like cancer there’s not a lot you can do for someone else. Seriously, if I could be all like, “Hey, I’ll take this round of chemo for you. Go relax for a while. I got this,” I totally would do it. But it’s not like picking up the check at the diner. You gotta leave the tough stuff to the medical professionals and the even more tough stuff to the patient. But pretty much most of us just have to sit around and wait. And worry. And wait. And worry. And wait. And worry. And wait more even when time seems to have slowed down to 1/8th normal speed. And repeat.

So what can you do on the sidelines? While you’re doing all that waiting and fingers-crossing and positive-thoughts-sending? There’s always something to do. Better to keep busy than to sit around do all that idle worrying.

So, I knit a few chemo caps.

And baked cookies to eat in the waiting room at the hospital.

I knit this pair of Official Slipper-Socks For Kicking Cancer In The Face.

And sewed up a few headscarves for when the weather was too warm for a thick hat.

But when that’s done, then you go back to the worrying. And the waiting. Because all the worrying and waiting you’re doing? Your friend is waiting and worrying a whole hell of a lot more, times like a bajillion. So that’s important to remember.

That’s pretty much all I can do. It doesn’t make me feel any more in control of a universe that I’m pissed at for messing around with my friend. But if it makes an almost intolerably horrid situation slightly more tolerable to deal with for her, then I’m glad to do it.

What I did learn is that while Ravelry will hook up you with a ton of good, free chemo cap patterns to knit or crochet, there aren’t a lot of DIY options for sewn head scarves out there. Well, I mean there aren’t a lot of GOOD options out there. Googling “chemo scarf pattern” or any variation will bring up a lot of duds on websites last updated in 1997. Here are few of the ones that I used as baseline guides, with good results, though a plain hemmed 36” square seemed to work the best.

This turban was quick and simple, and the instructions are fairly clear.

The layout on this site makes the pattern a little hard to understand, but if you read through it a few times, you’ll glean how to make this doo-rag style cap.

This isn’t a pattern, per say, but if you’re an intermediate or above seamster, you can figure it out from the pictures.

So there you go; maybe those links will come in handy one day. All of them are easy enough and I ended up making 5 or 6 scarves in a few different styles in one afternoon. I  really, really hope not, but reality is stupid sometimes. Yeah, this went to a more depressing place than I intended, so let me just end by saying friend is awesome and totally kicked Cancer in it’s stupid, ugly face and I’m so happy about it that I’m considering hiring a skywriter.

• Dakota Carding & Wool Co.
  I think this is the company I want to use to wash/card the fiber my aunt is sending me.
  (tags: spinning yarn reference services)
• Making Yarn With A Drop Spindle
  It always looks soooo simple when I see other people using drop spindles…but I’m thinking it’s probably not as easy as it looks.
  (tags: crafts diy fiber reference howto spinning)
• How To Make A Drop Spindle
  I’m too impatient to wait for a spindle to arrive in the mail. Maybe I should just make my own…
  (tags: diy spinning reference howto)

I don’t like summer.

Get a hold of yourself and let me explain. Deep breath. Better?

There are some wonderful things about summer, admittedly. The beach is one. I do loooove the beach. Most activities are acceptably conducted with margaritas or gin-and-tonics in hand. Gardens come in and veggies are plentiful in the back yard. Barbecuing things is pretty awesome. There are other things, probably, that I can’t remember right now because I’m grumpy about how hot it is.

But here’s the problem: where I live, it’s hot. It’s hot and it’s humid and I hate it. A lot. I work in a big, hot, crowded city steaming with pollution and tourists and I ride public transportation packed to the seams with other sweaty people. It’s 80 degrees before breakfast and it’s 90 degrees at bedtime and somewhere in the triple digits in between. BLECH.

The worst part? All that lovely handknit stuff that it’s just too hot to wear. I usually start holiday knitting in July, but it’s hard to lug around skeins of wool making mittens when it’s so hot your sweat is sweating. That’s why I like spring. And fall. And winter. But…just not so much summer.

There are a few reprieves. Take this, for example. My new favorite top. It’s made from Berroco Comfort Worsted,  which is light for an acrylic and almost like a cotton in texture and drape. So it will be light enough to wear in the summer time, on the ninety degree days if not the one hundred degree ones.

The pattern is from the Summer 2009 Knit.1: #14 Leaf Yoke Top.  I did a few mods: extra short rows to flare the bust and more decreases to taper the waist. In this picture it makes me look a bit stocky but the fit is actually very flattering. It started raining when I was taking this so I didn’t have time to dilly-dally for vanity. The arms ended up a bit too big so I probably could have done with fewer short rows, but live and learn. And accidentally flash some side-boob every once in a while.

My only regret about this pattern? FIVE MILLION MILES OF STOCKINETTE. The yoke is super-fun to knit, but it’s done in ten minutes. Then, you’re just left with a lot of stockinette. I’m going to go cast on some Shetland lace or something as a reward.